O autismo como invenção da psicopatologia moderna

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate how autism was invented by Psychiatry, from studies of modern psychopathology. In order to achieve this, we did a reading on the paradigms of modern Psychiatry, proposed by Lantéri - Laura, who served as introductory material for the study of the historical and epistemological construction of autism. The present study shows autism initially referred to as a symptom of schizophrenia by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, coming from the idea that the autistic manifestation was characterized by the behavior of extreme isolation from affective and social life. Subsequently, it was named as an autistic disturbance of affective contact, through the publication in English of an article by Leo Kanner entitled Autistic disturbances of affective contact. A hypothesis is sustained that, by being treated as a disorder, autism had no symptomatology, no etiology and no specific treatment, therefore it could not be classified as a disease. Currently, with the name of autism spectrum disorder, autism is a deviation from the behavioral patterns which is linked to a neurological disability as a root cause. However, without a clear etiology, we do not know what the real cause for the constitution of autism is. Therefore, this is a field of study and research in various areas of human knowledge, especially in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Through psychoanalytic reading of Freud and Lacan, we suggest that autism shows a failure in the establishment of the mirror stage, in regards of two subjective operations: alienation and separation. During the period of constitution of the subject in the baby, what fails in autism is the process of alienation in the field of the Other, the field of the language. Without going through the alienation, the baby faces separation without even having gone through autoerotic contact with itself and through the libidinal investment by the other. That is why the gaze of the Other is like a destructive agent for the so called autistic child, because the other person, representing the language for the child, is considered like a totally foreign body, causing suffering when it is placed in contact with this other. We observed that Lacanian psychoanalysis assumes that there is a chance of constituting a subject in autism, because it is perceived that the libidinal investment can be recognized, which suggests the idea of a preexistence of language, of the Other, in the so-called autistic child.